1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medicine supply apparatus that is placed at hospitals and pharmacies and supplies the designated number of medicines accommodated within tablet cases into a container (a bottle or a bag) in accordance with a prescription.
2. Description of the Related Art
In hospitals and pharmacies, a medicine supply apparatus such as one disclosed in, for example, Japanese Utility Model Application Publication (JP-Y) No. 57-5282 (B65B1/30) has been conventionally used to provide medicines prescribed by doctors to patients. In accordance with such a system, the designated number of medicines (tablets, capsules and the like) described in a prescription are discharged one by one from discharge drums (referred to as aligning boards in JP-Y No. 57-5282) within tablet cases. The discharged medicines are collected in a hopper through a chute and then packaged in packaging paper or bottled in a bottle.
Such a medicine supply apparatus is provided with a plurality of tablet cases and control for discharging medicine from each of the tablet cases is performed. In accordance with such control for discharging medicine, it is necessary that a tablet case accommodating medicine corresponding to a prescription is specified and a discharge drum or the like for the corresponding tablet case is rotated.
In such case, there has been conventionally utilized a method in which a memory which stores data for identifying the corresponding tablet case is mounted to a circuit board for the tablet case, electric wirings are connected to the tablet case to read the data, and the resultant data is used for control. In accordance with such a conventional method, however, the electric circuit for the tablet case becomes complicated, and costs are increased. Further, the electric wirings must be connected to a case accommodating section every time that tablet cases are exchanged. Thus, improvements for such drawbacks have been desired.
When medicine is discharged from the tablet case, a discharge drum for discharging the medicine one by one is rotated. If a motor for driving this discharge drum is disconnected, however, medicine cannot be discharged. Various causes of inability to discharge medicine may be considered, such as the case in which there is no medicine within a tablet case and the case in which medicine is clogged within the tablet case.
Such situations can be detected by visually checking tablet cases. However, disconnection of motors cannot be determined visually. Thus, there arises the problem in which it takes a long time to specify causes of failure and perform maintenance for corresponding parts.
Medicine is discharged from a tablet case by driving a discharge drum with a motor. A shutter for temporarily receiving medicine may be provided between a chute and a hopper. Such shutter is driven to be opened/closed by a solenoid. Further, when medicine is packaged in packaging paper, the paper is thermally sealed by a thermal sealing device and a time slot in which medicine should be taken is usually printed onto the packaging paper by a printer.
The aforementioned motor, solenoid, thermal sealing device and printer are parts that wear out and thus have their own durability limits. If such parts are broken, supply of medicine may be stopped.
A name of a patient taking the medicine and a time slot in which the medicine should be taken (before a meal or after a meal) are printed by a printer onto packaging paper or the like into which the medicine is charged. Pharmacists at pharmacies usually draw lines on the packaging paper with marking inks, especially for aged patients so that they can distinguish by colors the time slots in which medicine should be taken. This requires work by human hand, and further, errors may occur, resulting in confusion.